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The Planet of the Dead
The Planet of the Dead is an episode that was broadcast on 11 April 2009 (Doctor Who), and showcases the bus under attack at Sembawang Road. The episode depicts Christina fleeing the police from a museum robbery by boarding a bus that accidentally travels from London to the desert planet of San Helios, trapping her, the Doctor, and several passengers on board the damaged vehicle. After the bus driver dies trying to return to Earth, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, headed by Captain Erisa Magambo (Noma Dumezweni) and scientific advisor Malcolm Taylor (Lee Evans), attempt to return the bus while preventing a race of metallic stingray aliens from posing a threat to Earth. At the end of the episode, one of the passengers delivers a warning to the Doctor that "he will knock four times", foreshadowing the remaining three specials. "Planet of the Dead" was the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed in high definition, after a positive reaction to the visual quality of spin-off series Torchwood and the financial viability of HDTV convinced the production team to switch formats. To ensure that the desert scenes looked as realistic as possible, the production team filmed in Dubai for three days, sending several props, including a 1980 double-decker Bristol VR bus, to the United Arab Emirates for filming. After the bus was unintentionally damaged in Dubai by a shipping container, Davies rewrote the script to explain the damage in the narrative. Plot The burglar Lady Christina de Souza steals a gold chalice once belonging to King Æthelstan from a London museum and hops on a double-decker bus. The Tenth Doctor later joins her and the other passengers, just before the bus passes through a wormhole and ends up on the sands of the planet San Helios. The Doctor studies the wormhole and determines that the bus protected them from its effects like a Faraday cage, and is too late from stopping the driver from stepping back through. When the driver's skeleton appears on Earth, UNIT forces are alerted, led by Captain Erisa Magambo and aided by scientific adviser Malcolm Taylor. The Doctor contacts UNIT to coordinate efforts of how to return the other passengers safely to Earth. The Doctor and Christina scout ahead, while the others attempt to repair the bus. The Doctor and Christina spot a sandstorm on the horizon when they are met by two fly-like Tritovores, who take them to their wrecked spaceship. They explain they were delivering a shipment to San Helios, which had housed billions of people just recently but now is desert wherever they scan. The Doctor has them scan the approaching sandstorm and finds it really is a swarm of stingray-like aliens that are destroying the ecosystem. He suspects they are generating the wormhole to travel to their next planet to feed upon, and they must hurry and close the wormhole before they can reach Earth. Christina uses her burglary skills to obtain a power crystal and its mounting from the Tritovore ship, but accidentally wakes an alien stingray, which consumes the Tritovores. With the swarm nearly on them, the Doctor uses the crystal's mounting, an anti-gravity device, to enable the bus to fly, but to control it, he forces Christina to give him the gold chalice, which he hammers down to interface the bus's controls with the mountings. They fly back through the wormhole just as Malcolm and Magambo shut it down, but not before three stingrays sneak through, which UNIT quickly dispatch. Christina is arrested. She asks the Doctor to take her with him, but he refuses; however, he allows her to escape and fly off on the bus before authorities can stop her. As the Doctor departs, Carmen, a passenger who has low-level psychic abilities, has a premonition that the Doctor's "song" is ending and "he will knock four times". Filming Pre-production on the four specials started on 20 November 2008—four days before scheduled—because the episode's overseas filming in Dubai required the extra planning time. Two weeks later, the production team was on a recce for the special and the final draft of the script was completed. The production team examined overseas locations to film the episode because they wanted the scenery to feel "real" and thought that they would be unable to film on a Welsh beach in winter. After examining countries such as Morocco and Tunisia, the production team decided to film in Dubai because the area was more amicable to the filming industry and viable filming locations were nearer to urban areas than other locations. Production began on 19 January in Wales. The special was the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed in high-definition television resolution. The move to HD had previously been resisted for two major reasons: when the show was revived in 2005, high-definition television had not been adopted by an adequate portion of the audience to be financially viable; and special effects were considerably more expensive to create in high-definition than in standard-definition. "Planet of the Dead" was used as a switch to HD because of the show's reduced schedule in 2009 and because the filming crew had become experienced with the equipment while they were filming Torchwood. Filming began at the National Museum Cardiff, National Museum Cardiff (International Gallery): which doubled for the history museum depicted in the episode's first scene. To portray the tunnel the bus travelled into, the Queen's Gate Tunnel of the A4232 road in ButetownQueen's Gate Tunnel (Gladwall Tunnel): was closed for four nights to accommodate filming. The last major piece of filming in Wales took place in the closed Mir (formerly Alphasteel) steelworks in Newport,Mir Steelworks (Tritovore Spaceship): which doubled almost unaltered for the Tritovore spaceship. Scenes set in London's Oxford Street were filmed at St Mary Street, Cardiff. Filming took place at the peak of the February 2009 Great Britain snowfall, where the sub-zero temperatures slowed filming and had a visible effect on the cast. To accommodate for the adverse conditions, Davies included a line in the script that specified that the Tritovore spaceship cooled as external temperatures increase. Filming in DubaiDubai Desert (The Planet of the Dead): took place in mid-February 2009. Two weeks previously, one of the two 1980 Bristol VR double-decker buses bought for filming had been substantially damaged when a crane accidentally dropped a container in Dubai City Port. After an emergency discussion by the production team, they agreed that the damage was unintentionally artistic and decided to include the damaged bus in the episode; instead of shipping the spare bus from Cardiff—which would have delayed the already hurried filming schedule—the production team decided to partially reconstruct the bus in Dubai, damage the spare bus in Cardiff to match the bus in Dubai, and rewrite part of the script to accommodate and mention the damage to the bus. James Strong recalled the reaction of the production team to the damage to the bus in an issue of Doctor Who Magazine: The damaged bus was not the only problem to filming in Dubai: the first of the three days was afflicted by a sandstorm which left most of the footage shot unusable. The production team then struggled to complete three days of filming in two days; the last day was compared to "filming Lawrence of Arabia". To complete the episode's filming, interior scenes in the bus were filmed in a studio in Wales. To disguise the fact they were using a translite, a 360-degree background image, Strong utilised often-avoided techniques such as muddied windows and lens flares; the latter also served to create a warmer environment for the viewer. After filming ended, editing and post-processing took place until two days before transmission, leaving the BBC to resort to using an unfinished copy to market the episode.